Do bird scooter drivers land in Kentucky's emergency rooms?

The Washington Post has reported peaks in emergency room visits in several states where companies like Bird, Lime and Skip are at the heart of the application-based rental scooter phenomenon.

A Dallas family is also mourning the recent loss of a 24-year-old man, considered the first victim of a scooter.

But while other cities will bend broken wings and heal bird riders, we do not have the same kind of disaster here.

Bird scooters have certainly invaded our streets north of the Watterson Highway since their official arrival in August, but there has been no obvious rise in wounds at the emergency room level .

More: If you have not tried the scooters in Louisville, you have at least 30 days

According to a spokesman, Norton Hospital suffered no injuries. Emergency physicians at the University of Louisville Hospital also did not witness a tendency to crash.

At the same time, injuries comparable to car wrecks – broken noses, wrists and shoulders, lacerations and facial fractures, and blunt head trauma – are on the rise in seven other cities.

The director of the Santa Monica Emergency Department told the Washington Post that his team treated 18 critically injured patients in electric scooter accidents in just two weeks in July.

According to the article, another doctor who runs the emergency room at a large hospital in San Francisco said that he saw up to 10 serious injuries related to scooters in one. week.

When you have accumulated these anecdotes next to the conversations I had with our hospitals last week, it seems that the Louisville herd has an advantage.

Beyond the fact that we only have 100 of them in our streets instead of the hundreds you will see in Santa Monica and the larger areas, it's hard to guess what that might be.

For the record, it's not our behavior.

I sat outside about two hours earlier this month after Louisville Metro extended its tentative agreement with Bird, and I did not see a single runner wearing a helmet.

Read it: Surprise Surprise. Louisville Bird scooters break the rules

Helmets are mandatory and driving on sidewalks is prohibited. Locally, riders do not seem to have one or the other.

Bird likes to distribute helmets for free at promotional events, but riders do not worry about wearing them.

Or, as one reader wrote on Twitter after this column, "Because I will REALLY wear a helmet with me until I find a scooter. Yeah. D & # 39; AGREEMENT ".

These are not our streets either.

Bike paths in our city are about as common as cyclists wearing a helmet.

Awesome in theory Rarely in practice

We have a place for pedestrians and we have a place for automobiles, but bicycles and alternative modes of transportation have been largely rejected.

There is an employee of the Courier newspaper office who, most of the time, is wearing a visor helmet and a bright orange vest and is wearing his own scooter.

I called it a "scooter model" in my last Bird column, but a reader largely disagreed.

She did not choose her fashion sense or even her driving skills.

"There is an example of a city that is lacking the needs of its citizens in terms of road infrastructure," she continued. "It's an example of a city that desperately needs safer streets and protected lanes where cars are banned."

And really, she's right.

Ideally, anything that keeps emergency room visits in our city will continue while Louisville Metro makes a final deal with Bird.

And maybe all this will force a conversation that will go beyond collecting these bird droppings and lead to cleaning up a much larger mess of transportation.

You can like: If you have not tried the scooters in Louisville, you have at least 30 days